Livin Your Best Life

First topic message reminder :

“Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.”

—Robert Frost - “Nothing Gold Can Stay”

Every human being is made up at once of his conscious activity and his irrational experiences.

I must confess and I cannot deny the religious history of man, the sacred and the profane.

I cannot say anything but that the sacred revealed itself to me.

I had to face the myths and discover what they hinted at.

Looking at the Sidhe and the myths of the gods I feel these describe the inner aspects of humanity.

One does do battle and then realizes the fight was always within us.

Somehow the universe grants you moments outside of time to see into yourself.

“The way towards ‘wisdom’ or towards ‘freedom’ is the way towards your inner being. This is the simplest definition of metaphysics.”
— Mircea Eliade

My mother strangely asked me recently, am I the son of perdition or the prodigal son.

I said I am just this.

Upon reflection I would say BOTH.

We are trapped it seems by dualism.

Trapped between the sacred and profane.

One learns through inner alchemy how to join the opposites.

This to me is how I would describe being one.

Alchemy describes our inner experience and journey to oneness.

We can never be free of the sacred.

It simply doesn’t stop.

Profanity is our reaction sometimes.

To profane the sacred is a necessary step in making a human being.

But one can never truly be free of history no matter how hard we try.

Our whole culture and our lives are a response to something.

I learned early how to let myself be possessed by these forces that seem to want to speak in and through us.

But why?

What can be said?

Can a thought destroy the universe or create one?

What can be said of life but we have one and death will come to us as well.

Like a thief in the night.

I cannot relate to my mothers simple folk religion or the simple binary ways she sees things.

I cannot relate to final judgements about the nature of anything.

People do not live honestly, they live in terrible fear.

We fear something deep down.

Does the lower self serve the higher self?

What is this inner flame that never rests?

It may be impossible to avoid in the end.

When time is suspended, all that ever was or will be may exist together.

That would be a strange new world.

Amen.......

I seem to be challenged by this dude.

The Situation of Modern, Secular Humanity

Although those without a religion are deprived of the ability to reach the sacred and to transcend history, they are still, in Eliade’s words, “crypto-religious.” This is so because...

“[N]onreligious man descends from [religious man] and, whether he likes it or not, he is also the work of religious man; his formation begins with the situations assumed by his ancestors. … Nonreligious man has been formed by opposing his predecessor, by attempting to ‘empty’ himself of all religion… To acquire a world of his own, he has desacralized the world in which his ancestors lived; but to do so he has been obliged to adopt the opposite of an earlier type of behavior, and that behavior is still emotionally present to him, in one form or another, ready to be reactualized in his deepest being. … The ‘irreligious’ still behave religiously, even though they are not aware of the fact.”

In Eliade’s view, the irreligious have “emptied themselves” of only the content of religion, but have inadvertently retained the form of religion in their thought and behavior. Since, for Eliade, the religious state is the natural, default state of humanity, religious patterns of thought and behavior are inherent characteristics of being human. Even if one turns away from their intended purpose, they remain as entrenched and active as ever, just in a rather debased state.

I don’t necessarily agree with his conclusions, but he makes some interesting observations being a historian of religion.

But I have to say there seems to be some innate connection in us.

Some of us do drain ourselves of religious content.

I think that is the spark to reboot the sacred within ourselves or at least to reboot our connection to it.

Then in some way we revert to a form of animism.

We regress into original participation but we are kicked out of the nest sort of speak and have to live our lives with this revived connection to that which we understand not.

Now I’m sounding like a mystic.

I hate that

Hmmm..... we don’t say.......

I have realized all the gods and their myths point to the inner irrational states of being, they point to love and beauty and warn about arrogance and fear.

We are children of the sacred and profane.

We live in a profane time, where we deny the sacredness of life and death like never before.

We clutch to outer wealth and loud barkers in the town square promising what we only can give ourselves.

You need no priest or mediator between you and yourself.

Yuh see instantly, all who would show you yourself, are liars.

It is a tragic state for a human being to be trapped by fear.

In those timeless moments of doubt, one feels a pull...inside.

The sound of faint music is heard within.

One feels the burning question...

Who am I?

And the depths answer...

I AM

And then the challenge is heard...

Know Thyself

And you find this is also the ancient cry of humanity from history.

All of history, our journey to discover who we are.

We are bound together in this sacred search whether we like it or not.

We cannot deny history.

I have tried.

One also feels an invitation to taste forbidden fruit.

To break the rules and chains one feels bound by.

One longs for freedom from the illusions.

One does profane themselves in search of thyself.

But this is just more fear.

Then one passes through a gateless gate.

One can learn to not be troubled by thoughts and feelings about circumstances.

This journey to know thyself is the craziest, most fantastic and terrifying trip a human being can take.

Here, in the depths, somehow one can find a peace, a way to live between the sky and the earth.

Then we can fly, fly like an

Ethereal

Schopenhauer thought the basis of reality was passionate will, instinctive, not the rational world Hegel imagined.

I agree with Schopenhauer based on my own experience.

Not deliberate.

Nature is wild.

All that exists he says is the will.

Emotions are not representation but the will.

The mind is the representation of the will projected on the screen.

He postulates the will drives behavior, not the brain.

Intellect can conceptualize but it has little ability to change emotions.

We can be meta-cognitively aware of the feelings, but you can only let them come and go.

We know how we feel.

This thinking about the experiences causes suffering.

Once the monster of depths raises its head, it’s over.

Positive thinking is superficial.

Alone with the alone is true freedom when we pierce the screen of representations.

He came to same place Vedanta did on his own.

Damn, there I am being all mystical again.

Are we all partaking of the same will?

Perhaps.

You don’t need meta-cognition to meet inner impulses or desires such as hunger and thirst or arousal.

So we are nature driven by the telos to meta-cognize and know what the hell is going on here.

When we look down into the depths we see and experience the raw instinct of nature, pure will.

He was not a panpsychist.

A rock was not conscious, but a representation of will, instinctive passion.

What is your reaction to nature, passion?

We see beauty.

We feel it.

We know it as part of us.

Mmmm, good stuff.

Why are things here when we don’t look?

Cause something is holding this space for us, observing it all.

He saw only one will at work.

He takes chaos into account also.

—

We have our view inside.

That is our portal.

Our lens on the beast.

We have great power.

We are driven by some amazing will.

Schopenhauer noted this.

We have a window on the noumena.

You can know yourself.

The relationship between the noumena and phonomena can’t be causal.

We have a privileged inside view of ourselves.

Because I am myself.

How many minds in one mind.

We each are disassociated minds, which is a filter of consciousness/will.

Remove more filter, experience more of the will.

This is what happened with psychedelics.

Filter totally removed.

Reality is beyond your imagination.

It is absolutely beyond anything I could say.

I am somehow encouraged by finding others in history and recently saying what they hear and feel inside is...I am.

I feel I am will.

Somehow I understand this better today than I did yesterday.

Brain 🧠 waves observed are the will seen through the dissociated boundary.

So all conscious knowing of the mind is a misrepresentation of the actual experience.

Diggin Kastrup these dayz...





We are living in absurdity and will continue to have to do this.

For things are going to be very absurd.

Logic and rationality are going to get blown apart and materialism with them.

Poor Bernardo, he doesn’t understand the logos..... the telos of coherence.



.

We are driven by our passions no one can explain.

Intellect isn’t figuring this out.

It projects the multi-media show of simulacra.

Letting go.

Jumping.

These reveal more than your closed narrative.

From simplicity all this beauty emerges.

To know and understand are two very different concepts. Understanding prevents knowing not knowing. The mind seeks to understand and passes by knowing. In the interest of knowing Kant said, we must gladly give up understanding.

So it isn't what you understand, it is what you know. This is the meaning of Lao Tzu's saying “Those who know do not speak. Those who speak do not know.”

It is likely Lao and Wu are fictitious, but their words only point to something not spoken of.

Some thoughts from the Lost Writings of Wu Hsin...

"His writings are filled with paradoxes, which cause the mind to slow down and, at times, to even stop. Reading Wu Hsin, one must ponder. However, it is not an active pondering, but a passive one, much in the same way as one puts something in the oven and lets it bake for a while."

"Expectation is the grandfather of
Disappointment.
The world can never
Own a man Who wants nothing."

"Chasing after the things
One yearns for is
Inferior to
Chasing after
The source of the yearning."

"The attachment to beliefs is
The greatest shackle.
To be free is
To know that
One does not know."

"What is called peace by many is
Merely the absence of disturbance.
True peace cannot be disturbed;
It resides beyond the reach of disturbance."

"Controlling the mind doesn’t
Take one to freedom.
Controlling the mind
Adds another link To one’s shackles."

"Whereas pain is
A physical experience
Suffering is a mental one.
It is the sense that
Things should be
Other than they are.
Its antidote is Acceptance."

"There is no forest,
There is no cave,
There is no mountaintop
Where one can hide From oneself."

"To conquer the large,
Begin with the small.
To change your world,
Begin by changing yourself.
What needs to be changed?
Only the point of view."

"The Infinite has no preferences.
It kisses both the darkness and
The light equally."

Zu fragmentarisch ist Welt und Leben.
Too fragmentary is life and the world.

- H. HEINE

“4

A writer, particularly a young and inexperienced writer, feels himself under an obligation to give his reader the fullest answers to all possible questions. Conscience will not let him shut his eyes to tormenting problems, and so he begins to speak of "first and ultimate things." As he cannot say anything profitable on such subjects—for it is not the business of the young to be profoundly philosophical—he grows excited, he shouts himself to hoarseness. In the end he is silent from exhaustion. And then, if his words have had any success with the public, he is astonished to find that he has become a prophet. Whereupon, if he be an average sort of person, he is filled with an insatiable desire to preserve his influence till the end of his days. But if he be more sensitive or gifted than usual, he begins to despise the crowd for its vulgar credulity, and himself for having posed in the stupid and disgraceful character of a clown of lofty ideas.”

The flowers smell pretty today.

The dogs begged for a walk.

Time has been flowing so slowly.

People don’t talk about slow time much.

It is funny when I’m feeling it, my wife notes it and I smile.

Slow time is magick.

You can stretch out a moment and the clock just says a minute has passed.

But you know it’s been an hour.

In a rush, time moves fast.

Where do you have to go?

What do you have to do beyond the chores?

The chores can become adventures.

I can slow a day to a week with my wife.

When you notice now and stand in it.

Time almost stops.

My smelly opinion...

QAnon believers are the stupidest muppets on earth.

Closely followed by UFO muppets.

I mean ROCK DUMB.

Then come the religious fools and Eschatologists and prophets.

Don’t forget philosophers and the rational.

And then the political ideologues, I mean idiots.

Such are the times we live in.

Where we are free to be rock dumb.

We are free to dream any world we can.

I must admit, muppets are good for laughs and the cosmic blooper reel.

How do you live your best life amongst all the stupidity?!

Just mind your business and let them be stupid.

They all lose, but not really, they only lose their ignorance.

Love wins.

Amor Fati

Works^^^^

Using a second self is an effective way to show you what you might be missing about yourself.

So we begin by studying and then emulating the great we find in life.

With this self we don’t fight nature.

We accept what we cannot change.

This is how I birthed el Chivo or the smelly goat.

I didn’t even know it as it was happening.

A heard another voice in my thinking and writing.

I let myself step out of the way and let my deepest feelings express themselves.

I’ve never had more fun or been more surprised how agile I could be.

This expression became an alter ego.

This shifts the focus from the ego as primary center of mind.

It allows splinter aspects of ourselves to express and show themselves.

As a woman embracing more of the masculine or as a male embracing more of the inner feminine we individuate through wholeness.

We just hang out what we are.

The great sin is to repress yourself based on convention.

Alan watts said you have no need to be who you were 5 minutes ago.

A lot of wisdom there.

So when you can’t tell the difference between the other self and who you are, then you are yourself.

It is not awakening, it is hard work to integrate and let your deepest self express.

There are parts of the psyche only revealed through hallucination.

By pretending and dreaming.

We become possessed by our greatness.

We are haunted by our evil.

To deny the great evil in you, is to give it control.

We do not need to act on our impulses, but we do need to learn to let them express themselves.

Better one write about their strong feelings or express them in color than to let it result in uncontrolled action.

We focus more on what happens than what we felt before during and after.

The best possible world is a pluriverse.

Today I asked myself, where are the old gods?

Well, simply, they became the angels and daimons of the One God.

The ancient deities were local and the people integrated them into their reality.

The mind plus culture and env makes reality.

They thought very differently than we do.

They had a way of life that worked for them and they were deeply integrated with an imaginal world.

As the monotheist religions took hold they integrated the local spirits.

The old gods are alive and well here now.

Esotericism is an intersection of art and philosophy.

Ritualizing life in a certain direction is a powerful experience.

If you do not set a direction, all the brush strokes of the masterpiece are lost in false starts.

The old ways and gods are alive in the pagan sects.

One reason many have gone back to the old ways is to find a solution to the dead end we find ourselves in.

I have made little alters in my home that I use to maintain my connection to the imaginal world.

Soon after my psychedelic tea experiences, the connection to the imaginal world was very intense. It felt as real as the material world. That is something to consider. But I have let my creativity wane. And so my connection to imaginal world is less intense.

At full intensity you almost cant tell a difference between the material and imaginal. There you will find shangrila. There are many portals that can give you short trips there, but you yourself are the wardrobe that contains the gate to this land of pure consciousness.

Transpersonal fairyland.

A literal virtual reality populated by all our gods, monsters and myths hopes and fears.

You can add the UFO experiences to this fairyland I’m sure. Is Barfield’s and Corbin’s imaginary world the gateway higher dimensions?

So every religion is true in a way, symbols from the imaginal realm.

“One of the things that comes from esotericism is a view of “reality” which is not dualistic. When the average rationalist thinker considers “reality,” he will likely break it into “real” and “unreal.” Similarly, if he is a religious believer of some sort, he will break reality into “physical” and “spiritual.” Horses are real, Pegasus is unreal. Dogs are physical, angels are spiritual. Reality conveniently fits into these pairs of dualisms. Or does it? What if there were another layer of reality which was neither real nor unreal?

   The French scholar of mystical Islam, Henri Corbin (mid-20th century) gave this layer of reality the name “imaginal world.” It is originally a Neo-Platonic concept, which was adopted by the Sufis. Plato imagined a world of pure archetypes, where the ideal perfect prototypes of all objects reside. The esoteric Sufis conceived of a middle world, between the mundane world of stones and soup and the Platonic world of pure concepts and ideals like Love, Truth, and Goodness. In this middle world, the “imaginal” world, reside all the things which are mythical, which are the product of human imagination, and things which are the echoes of our “real” world seen in dreams or art. In the imaginal world, all these things are as real as things in the real world. There are dragons and damsels, spaceships and wizards, peaceful utopias and hellish dystopias. There are cities of crystal and cities of monsters, golden apples and laughing cats. All these things and more are in the Imaginal World. And the gateway to this world is human creativity and human imagination. This is how we reach it, and this is how we navigate through it.

   Are there things in the Imaginal World which people have NOT made up? The believers say, probably. The demons and the hells of torment, the paradises and the angels of delight, may reside here, as well as the saints, heroes, and villains of legend. There are places both terrifying and joyous, beings malevolent and gracious – and every moral shade in between. Sherlock Holmes lives here, and so does Dracula. Helen of Troy visits with Faust again; Humpty Dumpty gets put back together. There are infinite possibilities here, and it is just as possible that explorers of the Imaginal World are discovering things, as it is that they are making things up. Or so a believer would say. To old-fashioned rationalists, the Imaginal World is just another name for “silly fairy-tales,” “fabricated myth,” or “delusions,” or “hallucinations.” But in our modern age, we have yet another name for this Imaginal World: “virtual reality.”

   We are just beginning to understand how computer technology and the Atlantean Internet are changing our lives. “Virtual reality” twenty years ago was something out of science fiction. Now it is something we do every day, if we have that vital connection. We encounter images, people, things on our screens which we give a reality to without actual evidence that they are real. Video games give us a dazzlingly rendered illusion not only of entering another world but actually acting inside it. The screen has become our gateway to an electronically created Imaginal World. Quite a number of authors have already made the connection between the esotericists’ imaginal world, the occultists’ “astral plane” (basically the same concept) and the virtual reality of a computer network. It is becoming harder and harder to be an old-fashioned rationalist dualist – though there are still plenty of them to be found.

  To me, this is the best answer to where the old gods have gone. They are not theatrical spirits, who are only present when there’s an audience to believe in them. Nor are they necessarily Divine Beings with the all-encompassing status of the monotheists’ One True God. They are imaginal beings, who live in this middle world. And the Imaginal World is not a dreamworld dependent on the whims of one person; it is a shared multicultural universe, springing and flowering from the ground of millions of human beings and their minds and their creativity. Once the image, the poem, the character, the myth, the mathematical theorem, the story, the song, the magic, has been created, and has been set down in writing or in a computer file or in any other medium that can be communicated, it has left the confines of one person and entered the Imaginal – or the cultural world.

   The question remains: is this Imaginal World dependent on the existence of humanity for its own existence? If by some cosmic or human disaster, all human beings were wiped out, would this Imaginal World also disappear, like a projection of light onto dissipating clouds? It’s possible. But I’d like to think that it wouldn’t – that what has been thought and invented will go on in this imaginal world, to be picked up by the next sentient creatures who come along and have the imagination to get there. This could happen because somehow we were able to leave records of our culture behind which could be recovered. Or in a more mystical sense, it could live on because imagination reaches a layer of reality which is filled with information that is not dependent on human existence, a cosmic library ready to read.

   For now, the Imaginal World is based in culture and its communications media, and from there, in the minds of anyone here who has imagination. The gods live here. This is why fanatical fundamentalist monotheists try to censor culture and Imaginal gateways like books, movies, websites, storytellers. They know that the gods their God hates are still alive. Of course there is indeed a dark side to the Imaginal World, and many a dreamer has been drawn in to ruin; you have to be as cautious in the Imaginal World as you are in the real one, perhaps more so. But here is where the secret temples are, the “ineradicable cultural objects” that not even the might of the One True God can stamp out. Do you want to meet the forgotten gods? Have tea with Zeus and Apollo? Here are the directions: the Word, the Image, the Sound, the Creative Imagination, and then the recounting. Don’t forget to tell us, however you can set it down, where you’ve been, and how Athena’s been doing these last two thousand years.“

I have given my account as best I could.

My brief journeys into that land have led me to great wisdom and a new way of seeing the world.

I think I just remembered what I always knew or brought it into conscious light through ritual imaginal acts.

That’s how you can meet anyone by the camp fire.

Barfield said that being creative means striking out in new directions and not accepting ready-made relationships, which takes stamina and a willingness to be alone for awhile.

It has been a lonely road, but I see why it has to be.

No one can walk your path.

We all have to figure out our own life.

A creative life is most authentic to me.

Can you reconnect with the Anima Mundi, the world soul?

Does such a thing exist?

Moderate your reactivity.

This is what I feel in nature.

Or you will be moderated.

If we get stuck in small reactive loops, primitive mayhem ensues.

The world soul must anchor itself in the individual.

Through this, intuitive information has been injected into our culture.

Exploring as individuals together, good things come.

To separate individuals leads to bad fragmented results.

How does one explore disclosure or the phenomena as an individual?

The individual exposes itself to the world soul.

Sex and psychedelics are effective ways at rebooting this connection.

This is seen as a threat by the disconnected.

To integrate this information has been difficult.

It goes much easier these days.

But my brush with the world soul has left me open.

It humbled me.

It has shown me I don’t understand my life or this culture or world separated from its center.

That one will suffer from vertigo the further from the center they go.

So here we are in a fragmented culture which can be reintegrated.

One does not need to move or travel anywhere to realize this.

My inside is your outside and vice versa.

The world soul wants wide open two way communication.

This implies possibly awareness beyond the individual.

Is that a species will?

Is there a basic will to life?

I think we can each say, OH YES!

This is the existential glue of life.

We find ourselves here together, entangled in the connective tissues of the world.

Brahman and Atman.

The patriarchy, the Oneness, the monistic, has tried to stamp out the vermin.

Us.

It does not want us to worship anything but ourselves.

It is a selfishness.

A consumption that plagues us.

So we scapegoats bear this deeply.

Inside and out.

Not victims.

Sacrifices.

I have this idea for a children’s book series about the lost tribe of goats.

The world is always sparking creative acts.

Some are spontaneous, but the best take focus to bring into being.

We have a deep need for sexual connection and this Union is an altered state of awareness.

This is the center of esoteric teaching, the alchemical wedding.

Sexual creative Union is truly the greatest state we know.

An existential quintessence.

There we are fully sentient.

In union.

So imagine all the taboos as simply ignorance of true being.

There we can have true exchange with the world soul with the blotting out of the self.

Advanced aliens, if they were, would be fully realized sexual beings.

Is transcendence asexual?

The uncaused.

We teach this by being earnest in our work through tacit wisdom or great works of art.

The inner journey is a longing for reconnection.

DMT is central to making the bridge.

How can a chemical, as we understand chemicals, trigger these things?

Chemicals are not just chemicals in themselves.

A causal response to the uncaused then?

That’s why I used them, to reconnect with something I felt distant from.

But I was never apart from wholeness.

My thinking simply gave the false sense of separation until I used thinking to think about thinking.

I wrote a tapeworm.

Breakthrough or bust, I threw myself over the cliff.

That throwing of one self into this seems critical to make the connection.

You have to jump off the cliff to realize you can fly.

One can be flooded by unconscious symbols.

Affluence is stifling.

Poverty shows how simple life is and what little we need.

The imaginal realm then is a psychochomp.

A bridge over troubled waters.

What is occulted drives outward culture and personal actions.

The culture can never accept this directly, but must integrate the occult into its ritualized actions.

Psychedelics have helped this process.

Been enjoying reading Colin Wilson and Gary Lachman a great deal recently.

Lachman has done some great talks on New Thinking Aloud, highly recommend.

I share Lachman’s and Wilson’s existential and occult bend.

I like the fringe thinkers best, the brilliant ignored ones.

Lachman and Wilson are more following and narrating their own journeys through their unconscious and I think this so interesting and most authentic.

Colin is more of a fiction writer and Lachman more of a historian of the occult with a personal take.





Beware the Robot.

Another interesting dude.



And a new thread 🧵 I’m following.



I’ve been practicing noticing when “I” react and speak and what if “I” remains unattached and or silent.

what heart can shake the mountain

i crawled on the ground as a worm
a bird carried me to the golden center
i felt along the statue’s skin

smooth and vibrating
warm like honey
until imperfection found

it is here I scratch

...do you seek the misty gates?

Experiences will bind you like a bundle of wood for the fire.

Dance in their flames.

Spin spin spin

Knowing is directly perceiving reality.

What do you seek to know?

What you seek is seeking thee.

What is your essence resonates with this energy.

Circumstances circumstances be damned.

See what is directly before you.

You are attention.